Sexual Offences Act 1967: Partial Decriminalisation in England

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 was the law that partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men in England and Wales. Receiving Royal Assent on 27 July 1967, it allowed two consenting men aged 21 or over to have sexual relations in private without committing a crime. It was a landmark in British social reform, although its narrow terms meant that full legal equality took decades longer.

Background: criminal laws against gay men

Sex between men had been a crime in England since the Buggery Act of 1533. In 1885 the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act added the offence of “gross indecency” between men, which covered almost any sexual contact, in public or in private. It was under this law that the writer Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in 1895. Sex between women was never made a specific criminal offence.

Prosecutions rose sharply after the Second World War. In 1952 the mathematician Alan Turing, whose wartime work at Bletchley Park had helped break German codes, was convicted of gross indecency and given hormone treatment. In 1954 the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the journalist Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers attracted wide publicity and sympathy, and many people began to question whether the law was just.

The Wolfenden Report

In 1954 the Conservative government set up a Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading. Its report, published on 4 September 1957, recommended that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.

The committee spent three years gathering evidence from doctors, police officers, judges, clergy and a small number of gay men, including Peter Wildeblood. It argued that there must remain a realm of private morality that was not the law’s business. It set the proposed age of consent at 21, the age of majority at the time. The government accepted the report’s proposals on prostitution, which led to the Street Offences Act 1959, but declined to act on homosexuality, judging that public opinion was not ready.

Public opinion and opposition

Reform was controversial. Many people, including senior figures in the churches, the police and both main parties, believed that homosexuality was immoral and that the law protected public morals. Others, including the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council, argued that private behaviour between adults should not be a criminal matter, even if they disapproved of it.

Critics of the old law pointed especially to blackmail. Because gay men risked prison and public disgrace, they were easy targets for blackmailers, and the law was sometimes called a “blackmailer’s charter”. The 1961 film “Victim”, starring Dirk Bogarde as a barrister threatened with exposure, brought this problem to a wide cinema audience.

In the House of Lords, opponents of reform included Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, who warned against weakening the law. Supporters argued that the existing law was unenforceable, cruel and out of step with modern medical and psychological thinking. Opinion polls in the mid-1960s suggested that public attitudes were slowly shifting towards reform, even though most people still disapproved of homosexuality.

The campaign for reform

In 1958 supporters of the Wolfenden recommendations founded the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Its early backers included academics, writers, clergy and politicians. The society published pamphlets, lobbied MPs and peers, and slowly built support among the establishment.

Several attempts at legislation failed in the early 1960s. In 1965 the Earl of Arran introduced a bill in the House of Lords, which passed there. The Conservative MP Humphry Berkeley introduced a bill in the Commons in 1966, but it fell when Parliament was dissolved for the general election.

After Labour’s victory in 1966, the Labour MP Leo Abse took up the cause with a private member’s bill. Although the government did not formally sponsor it, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, made parliamentary time available, which was crucial for its success. The bill passed the Commons after a long debate in July 1967, and Lord Arran guided it through the Lords.

What the act did

The act stated that a homosexual act in private between two consenting men who had both reached 21 would not be an offence. It applied only to England and Wales and did not cover the armed forces or the merchant navy.

The definition of “private” was very narrow. An act was not private if more than two people took part or were present, or if it took place in a public lavatory. Penalties for some offences involving younger men were actually increased.

Lord Arran and Leo Abse both presented the act as an act of tolerance rather than approval. Lord Arran asked those who benefited from the act to behave quietly and with discretion. Many gay men welcomed it as relief from blackmail and fear, but campaigners soon criticised its limits and the assumption that gay men should remain hidden.

Limits and later reforms

In practice police continued to prosecute men for gross indecency and soliciting, and the number of convictions for some offences rose in the years after 1967. Gay rights groups such as the Gay Liberation Front, founded in London in 1970 and inspired partly by the Stonewall riots in New York, demanded full equality.

Reform came step by step. Scotland decriminalised in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982, the latter after the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the UK in Dudgeon v United Kingdom (1981). The age of consent was lowered to 18 in 1994 and to 16 in 2001. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 abolished the offence of gross indecency, and the armed forces’ ban on gay personnel ended in 2000.

In 2013 Alan Turing received a posthumous royal pardon, and in 2017 the so-called “Turing’s Law” pardoned thousands of men convicted under the old laws.

Legacy

The 1967 act is remembered as one of the liberal reforms of the late 1960s, along with the abolition of the death penalty for murder in 1965, the Abortion Act 1967 and divorce law reform. It marked a shift in thinking about the relationship between law and private morality.

Its 50th anniversary in 2017 was widely marked in Britain, with exhibitions at Tate Britain and the British Library and a season of television and radio programmes. Historians see it as a beginning rather than an end, part of a wider international change that also included the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Timeline

• 1885: The Labouchere Amendment creates the offence of gross indecency between men.
• 1954: The Wolfenden Committee is appointed.
• 1957, 4 September: The Wolfenden Report is published.
• 1958: The Homosexual Law Reform Society is founded.
• 1965, May: Lord Arran introduces a reform bill in the House of Lords.
• 1967, July: Leo Abse’s bill passes the House of Commons.
• 1967, 27 July: The Sexual Offences Act receives Royal Assent.
• 1980–1982: Similar reforms in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
• 2001: An equal age of consent of 16 takes effect.

Why it matters

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 ended centuries of criminal punishment for private relationships between adult men in England and Wales. Though limited, it opened the way for later reforms that brought legal equality for gay people in the United Kingdom.